What If IRS Went Rogue on its Own?

Writes Jonah Goldberg: 

For understandable reasons, the IRS scandal has largely focused on the political question of whether the White House deliberately targeted its opponents. To date there's no evidence that it did. That's good for the president, but it may not be good for the country, because if the administration didn't target opponents, that would mean the IRS has become corrupt all on its own.

Goldberg's Of the Bureaucrats, by the Bureaucrats, for the Bureaucrats reminds us why government bureaucracies at every level must be cut back.

UPDATE:  In How to Control the IRS and America's Untouchable Caste of Bureaucrats, Mark Fitzgibbons argues that citizens ought to be able to bring liability lawsuits against law-breaking bureaucrats:

In America’s first 100 years, federal officials could be sued in state courts for acting beyond their authority. In his book Creating the Administrative Constitution, Yale law professor Jerry Mashaw chronicles how this helped temper bad behavior.

Law professor Glenn Reynolds over at Instapundit is among those who believe that government officials need more civil and criminal liability for their bad acts. There are some private remedies on the books, but they are too weak to be effective.

The National Organization of Marriage sued the IRS for illegally disclosing its donors, and recently settled for $50,000. Taxpayers paid the penalty, and lawbreakers within the IRS suffered no adverse consequences.

The way to control this epidemic of government law-breaking is to allow citizen victims to sue, and legislate personally liability for bureaucrats guilty of willfully illegal conduct.

If the GOP were serious about tackling government abuse, it would initiate legislation now and even add private remedies to its platform. That would have wide support from the public.

Until government bureaucrats face the consequences of meaningful remedies, they will continue to act like America's untouchable class.

Pro-Business versus Pro-Market

In What Principles Rule the GOP?, Jonah Goldberg reminds GOP leadership of the distinction between being "pro-business" and "pro-market," and says party leadership's understanding of that distinction will be put to the test when they consider reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank next year.

Just to clarify, the difference between being pro-business and pro-market is categorical. A politician who is a "friend of business" is exactly that, a guy who does favors for his friends. A politician who is pro-market is a referee who will refuse to help protect his friends (or anyone else) from competition unless the competitors have broken the rules. The friend of business supports industry-specific or even business-specific loans, grants, tariffs or tax breaks. The pro-market referee opposes special treatment for anyone.

Goldberg argues the GOP can't play the crony capitalism game of the Democrats any longer.

GOP politicians can’t have it both ways anymore. An economic system that simply doles out favors to established stakeholders becomes less dynamic and makes job growth less likely. (Most jobs are created by new businesses.) Politically, the longer we’re in a “new normal” of lousy growth, the more the focus of politics turns to wealth redistribution. That’s bad for the country and just awful politics for Republicans. In that environment, being the party of less — less entitlement spending, less redistribution — is a losing proposition.

Also, for the first time in years, there’s an organized — or mostly organized — grassroots constituency for the market. ... Now, there’s an infrastructure of tea-party-affiliated and other free-market groups forcing Republicans to stop fudging.

Goldberg: Freedom - The Unfolding Revolution

Jonah Goldberg addresses the question, why there are no libertarian countries today?, raised by Michael Lind in Salon.com.

Such is the philosophical poverty of liberalism today that this stands as a profound question.

Definitions vary, but broadly speaking, libertarianism is the idea that people should be as free as possible from state coercion so long as they don’t harm anyone. The job of the state is limited to fighting crime, providing for the common defense, and protecting the rights and contracts of citizens. The individual is sovereign; he is the captain of himself.

It’s true, no ideal libertarian state has ever existed outside a table for one. And no such state will ever exist. But here’s an important caveat: No ideal state of any other kind will be created either.

America’s great, but it ain’t perfect. Sweden’s social democracy is all right, but if it were perfect, I suspect fewer cars would be on fire over there.

Ideals are called ideals for a reason: They’re ideals. They’re goals, aspirations, abstract straight rules we use as measuring sticks against the crooked timber of humanity.

In a fitting tribute to Independence Day, Goldberg quickly weaves through the various experiments of governments and their failures (and Anne Morrow Lindbergh's 1940 that statist governments were the "wave of the future") to conclude:

The only truly new political idea in the last couple thousand years is this libertarian idea, broadly understood. The revolution wrought by John Locke, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, and the Founding Fathers is the only real revolution going. And it’s still unfolding.

Indeed, what’s remarkable about all of the states Lind identifies as proof that libertarianism doesn’t work is that they are in fact proof that it does. What made the American experiment new were its libertarian innovations, broadly speaking. Moreover, those innovations made us prosper. Even Sweden — the liberal Best in Show — owes its successes to its libertarian concessions.

I’m actually not a full-blown libertarian myself, but it’s an ideal I’d like America to move closer to, not further away from as we’ve been doing of late — bizarrely in the name of “progress,” of all things.

UK Guardian: New Books 'Sure to be Rightwing Hits'

The UK Guardian cattily previews several new American books that no one should care about but that are 'sure to be rightwing hits', including:

Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama, by Ann Coulter
The story of the left's agenda to patronize blacks and lie to everyone else.

I Know You Are, But What Am I? by Jonah Goldberg
Goldberg challenges conventional wisdom from "Democrats are the party of civil rights" to "Nazi's were rightwing." 

PUNK'D!!! Conservative Arguments to Drive Liberals #@!**?@ Crazy!, by S. E. Cupp and Greg Gutfeld
"This book is sure to annoy the 'politically correct' brigade, whose opinions Cupp and Gutfeld certainly don't care about!"

Islam vs. Free Speech

"Amid widespread protests against an amateur movie that denigrates Islam's Prophet Mohammad," reports the Washington Times, at least one Muslim leader — with the backing of the 57 states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation — wants the United Nations to criminalize blasphemy against his religion:

“We call for legislation or a resolution to criminalize contempt of Islam as a religion and its prophet,” Emad Abdel Ghaffour, who heads the ultra-orthodox [Egyptian] sect’s Nour political party, told Reuters over the weekend.

Jonah Goldberg writes about a recent parody, headlined "No One Murdered Because of This Image" in the faux-newspaper Onion, in which 4 "cherished figures from multiple religious faiths were depicted engaging in a lascivious sex act of considerable depravity." Missing was Islam's prophet Mohammed.

The Onion’s point should be obvious. Amidst all of the talk of religious tolerance and the hand-wringing over free speech in recent days, one salient fact is often lost or glossed over: What we face are not broad questions about the limits of free speech or the importance of religious tolerance, but rather a very specific question about the limits of Muslim tolerance and the unimportance of free speech to much of the Muslim world.

It’s really quite amazing. In Pakistan, Egypt, and the Palestinian territories, Christians are being harassed, brutalized, and even murdered, often with state support, or at least state indulgence. And let’s not even talk about the warm reception Jews receive in much of the Muslim world.

And yet, it seems you can’t turn on National Public Radio or open a newspaper or a highbrow magazine without finding some oh-so-thoughtful meditation on how anti-Islamic speech should be considered the equivalent of shouting “fire” in a movie theater.

But there is no equivalency, argues Goldberg. Muslims are people, not a force of nature. They have free will. They choose to riot.

There’s nothing wrong with exercising sound judgment, even caution, when it comes to offending another’s most cherished beliefs. But the First Amendment isn’t the problem here, the dysfunctions and inadequacies of the Arab and Muslim world are.

James Burnham famously said that when there is no alternative there is no problem. If free speech in America causes a comparative handful of zealots to want to murder Americans, the correct response is to protect Americans from those zealots (something the Obama administration abjectly failed to do in Libya) and relentlessly seek the punishment of anyone who succeeds. Because, as far as America is concerned, there is no alternative to the First Amendment.

If only we had national leadership who would defend Americans' cherished freedoms and beliefs as strongly.

Quiz: How Liberal Are You?

Are you 'stuck in a liberal mindset'?  Take AEI's short online quiz to find out. Fun and enlightening.